December 14, 2011

Remember the game Breakout? These days with game controls like the Kinect who wants to use the old style joysticks anymore? ECE 5760 students Meng-Ling (Maxwell) Liu, Thu-Thao Nguyen and Yang Yang designed a game that they call HAND BREAKING BRICKS. They are using an FPGA to display the game on the monitor while it is also monitoring a Terasic CCD module which allows the game to “see” the location of the players hand. The players hand location directly reflects to the location of the ball bouncing bar.

“In order control the game using hand motions, we need a device to track hand movement. We chose the Terasic CCD kit, which consists of a 1.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor and an IDE cable to connect to the GPIO port of the DE2 board. We followed the provided code to learn how to use the camera in the kit.
The current image is captured by the camera and sent to the DE2 board, then each video frame is stored in the SDRAM. We detected the hand position in the recorded frame using the skin color detection scheme in the top module.”